Tutorial

This guide will walk you through setting up a target language, composite font, authoring and translating the text inside Game Maker and seeing your work in game.

There are many ways to run the pipeline and author text and this guide will only focus on one basic workflow skipping the transfer stage of the pipeline.

See the Translating Text page to see the full pipeline.

Project Setup

Make sure to first follow the Installation Guide and ensure you have access to the Cultured Dashboard in Tools -> Cultured and access the gml functions from the Runtime package. Choose or create an object in your project that draws on the screen to build the example in.

Set up your Native and Target languages

In the Cultured Dashboard navigate to the Languages tab and add a Target language. You should leave the native language option as en unless you're using a different language for all of your games untranslated text. This guide will choose Korean, you can use anything you like but later this guide will also use Korean fonts.

• Native language is the language you author your text in before handing it over to translators.
• Target languages are additional languages your game supports after handing it over to translators.

Set up your fonts

The target language for this guide is Korean. If you haven't already download and install NotoSan and NotoSansKR from Google fonts and install them to your PC. If you already have fonts you want to use then you can just use those instead of downloading them.

1. Right click in the asset browser and create two new Font Assets
2. Link the new Font Assets to your desired system installed fonts. This guide uses NotoSans family from Google Fonts. If you've installed fonts to your system while Game Maker is running you will have to restart Game Maker before it loads your new fonts.
3. Click "Add Composite Font" in Cultured Dashboard -> Composite Fonts
4. Map the correct language to the correct font.

Composite Fonts and the Asset Compiler

Game Maker tries to do you a favor by not wasting space and time packing fonts that are not used by your game. It does this by looking at what your .gml files reference. Since this guide does not reference the Font Assets directly we must add an asset tag to both Font Assets to force Game Maker to cook these fonts.

Author Native Text

In your chosen test object add the following code to the create event.

// at the same time this both authors the text that will 
// appear in Cultured Dashboard and returns the localized
// text struct
my_text = cultured("Hello World");

Translating Text

Now that there is a font and a piece of text to localize head to the Cultured Dashboard main Dashboard tab and click the Run Pipeline button. Ensure the dropdown has "Full Pipeline" selected. Once you do this your text will instantly appear in the Cultured Dashboard main tab Language Table. See the Cultured Dashboard reference for more information on these screens.

Click "Korean" from the language table selector to see the Korean text. You will see that the text is flagged as red as there is a translation missing. Go ahead and add 헬로 월드 to the translation field.

Compiling Text

Finally re-run the Cultured Pipeline in the Cultured Dashboard main tab. This will generate a binary file for Game Maker to use for your translations during game time as well as generate the glyph ranges needed in your composite fonts.

Drawing The Text

The last thing to do is draw the text and test it in English and Korean. In your chosen test object add the following code to the draw event.

// create 
my_text = cultured("Hello World");

 // casing must match exactly from Composite Fonts 
 // in Cultured Dashboard!
body_font = cultured_get_font("Body");

// step
if (keyboard_check_pressed(ord("E")))
{
  cultured_set_current_language("en");
} else if (keyboard_check_pressed(ord("K"))) {
  cultured_set_current_language("ko");
}

// draw

// make sure to use .font and .str on the Cultured structs
draw_set_font(body_font.font);
draw_text(x, y, my_text.str);